Editorial: Computation In The Sonic Arts

There are many ways to generate and organise the sounds of a composition. Notwithstanding the early precedents in musical dice games and the rules for contrapuntal voice leading, the use of formal procedures to make musical artefacts of a certain complexity without direct human intervention became practicably realisable with the advent of digital computers. This occurred in the second half of the twentieth century at the same time as artificial intelligence researchers were dreaming of a model of the human personage in which bodies and minds were more like machines than self-generating organisms. Some composers took the opportunity to develop algorithmic procedures to model works of the past, others to explore the representation of mathematically defined, natural and abstract processes that have no immediate connection to music such as set and group theory, probability distributions, Markovian stochastics, self-similarity, iterated function systems, adaptive networks and other combinatorial techniques. More recently, attention has also turned to the sonic representation, or translation, of messy collected data, scraped from the internet, or gathered by monitoring human, natural, environmental and other activities and to the development of intelligent agents that collaborate in composition, improvisation and performance. Early collaborations with computational systems were met with some hostility by the musical establishment. Arguments ranged from whether or not, in replacing parts of the creative process with an automated system, we were de-humanising the resultant artefacts. Were we cheating by letting the tools do the work? Was is it even possible to produce tools which can adequately challenge the intensely human ‘creative’ process? Did overtly reasoned processes have any place in musical composition in a domain of human activity which should be driven by feelings, intuition, and other nonalgorithmic considerations? Despite those early suspicions, composers have continued to actively engage with computation in the forming of new works. To date, many of the publications that document this work concentrate, through examples, on the ‘hows’ not the ‘whys’ of algorithmic composition. This issue of Organised Sound breaks somewhat from that tradition by seeking to go beyond descriptions of how specific compositional procedures are used in individual compositions in order to address the social and musicological dimensions of computation. In doing so, it aims to stimulate conversation and interdisciplinary communication about the activity of computational design as it applies to the sonic arts. In Anacoustic modes of sound construction & the semiotics of virtuality, Robert Seaback discusses some technical and aesthetic aspects of sound synthesis in the context of modes of sound construction that address the computer at its most fundamental level: the syntactic level of information. When sound is considered first as an informational construct rather than a material circumstance, the nature of signification is changed, as it ruptures the initial and dominant meanings that arise from our acoustic experience: In post-humanist, anacoustic modes, sounds can be considered as expressions of themateriality of information. My own article, ‘Computational Designing of Sonic Morphologies’, examines the origin and consequences of a materialist sound-object mindset in which the hierarchical organisation of sonic events, especially those developed through notational abstraction, are considered antithetical to sounds ‘being themselves’. It argues that musical sounds are not just material objects, and that musical notations, on paper or in computer code, are not just symbolic abstractions but instructions for embodied actions between resonators and actuators. When notation is employed computationally to control resonance and gestural actuators at multiple acoustic, psychoacoustic and conceptual levels of music form, and it is possible for vibrant sonic morphologies to emerge and be sustained from the quantum-like boundaries between them. I argue that, in order to achieve that result, it is necessary to replace our primary focus of compositional attention from the Digital Audio Workstation sound transformation tools currently in vogue, with those that support algorithmic thinking at all levels of compositional design. This will afford the reinstatement of the use of symbolic logics in electroacoustic composition at multiple structural levels from microsound resonance generation and activation to corporally informed gesture models. Further, it offers the potential to stimulate and enable the creation of new alliances between the capacity of our auditory processing to produce only weak cognitive bindings to unknownsound sources and symbolic structures, and indoing so, enable metaphorical cognitive sub-conscious forms to emerge. In ‘From Artificial to Extended Intelligence in Music Composition’, Artemi-MariaGioti explores the relationship and disparities between human and computational